Evertson presents at national conference

He discussed the work of an Indigenous Recognition and Reconciliation committee he serves on that was created in 2021. The committee, composed of CSC faculty members and Mari Sandoz Society board members, has studied land acknowledgment statements of other colleges and universities and drafted a potential statement for CSC.

“One of the challenges we have confronted is that this region was very much a ‘commons’ where various tribes cooperated and sometimes fought and displaced each other over these hunting grounds, and called the region, at various times, home. Then came the ‘contested plains’ where settlers displaced the Indigenous groups,” Evertson said.

He discussed a 2018 display of portions of the Fort Laramie Treaty at the American Indian Museum in Washington D.C. to call attention to the treaty’s 150^th anniversary. A report about the exhibit in Smithsonian Magazine said delegates from Sioux and Northern Arapaho Nations were present at the unveiling and performed a sacred pipe ceremony to honor the original signatories with two dozen of their descendants in attendance.

“In some ways, the Black Hills and the Fort Laramie Treaty lands may be a unique element of dispossession as a kind of tribal commons, as we confronted and continue to grapple with in our draft land acknowledgment statement, which prompted the involvement of our group with the ‘Reckoning and Reconciliation on the Great Plains: Confronting Our Past, Reimagining our Future’ conference at the Center for Great Plains Studies in 2022 at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where we presented an overview of our project titled ‘In the Shadow of the Sacred: Developing a Lands Statement that Moves Beyond Recognition and Towards Reconciliation’,” Evertson said.

He said one model for the college more fully to partner with Indigenous neighbors in environmental studies and environmental humanities projects would include the writings of regional authors such as Mari Sandoz.

“She was an early and passionate advocate for Native American rights who explored both western and Indigenous approaches to art, science, and public policy across her fiction, nonfiction, and correspondence,” Evertson said.

He said the committee has become engaged with the work of Dr. Margaret Jacobs, the center’s director, whose book, After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America’s Stolen Lands, documents in detail the dispossession of the tribes in the Great Plains, and then follows with examples of efforts towards reconciliation.

“Jacobs is not Indigenous but writes from a perspective of a historian and as a descendant of settlers who grew up in good schools in the great plains but nonetheless found this story of dispossession and depredation largely ignored in curricula,” Evertson said.

Evertson said Jacobs, who has helped to organize the reconciliation rising project, points to several examples of healing paths forward including a bill passed by the Nebraska Legislature in 1989 the first state repatriation act, which became the precedent for the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Other efforts toward reconciliation include the Pawnee Seed Preservation Project led by Deb Echo-Hawk who partnered with the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument in Kearney, Nebraska, to plant sacred Pawnee Corn in a garden near the Interstate 80 icon.

Evertson also discussed the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer which includes a metaphor of melding indigenous with non-indigenous ways of knowing, captured in the traditional way of growing corn, squash, and beans together, known as the Three Sisters.